xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
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I once met a girl in a bar who spoke such absolutely perfect and grammatically correct German she did sound like an alien impersonating a human.
Or someone who very much wants to show that she’s better than you.Turns out she wasn’t from Germany at all. She was an immigrant from Slovakia, who had learnt German at such a high level that it sounded weird.
I’ve had Americans ask me the meaning of words I’ve used in a sentence. Like “what’s tranquil?” (I’m non-native.)
I blame reading.
Speaking English using French vocabulary is a real cheat code
English speakers can really enhance their vocabulary when they know French. English does have a lot of French words that most people don’t use anymore but if you use them, your vocabulary becomes off-the-charts intellectual.
Pseudo-intellectual. A clear communicator uses the simplest, precise word that has the precise meaning they intend, reaching most commonly for the Germanic vocabulary unless they need the subtler shades of meaning from the Latinate. A pseudo-intellectual uses Latinate vocabulary to conceal what they’re actually saying or to intimidate people who aren’t as comfortable on the Latinate side of the fence. It’s a form of intellectual bullying that, to my mind, makes the person using it look insecure (not to mention likely dishonest).
A good communicator’s motto should be “eschew gratuitous obfuscation (see what I mean?)”.
I was thinking more of Spanish, but yup. Same thing.
Yeah, coming from Portuguese, I know by hearth all of the refined vocabulary to be found in English.
But the mundane is a whole other world.
Like “bamboozled”!
Anglo-language conversations plus Franco-vocabulary utilization, remains a veritable trick code
De rien
I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I’m amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.
English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of “in”-vs-“on” or even in certain forms of past tense.
However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn’t know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.
All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it’s a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the “knowledge of foreign languages” also has some impact.
Got called a rich kid for knowing the word “carafe.” Pretty sure I learned it from a book, my parents didn’t have carafe with mountain spring water or some shit around the house.
I learned it trying to fix a coffee maker. It’s news to me that it ain’t a coffee specific word.
The term “carafe” puts me in mind of a crystal glass container of between half a litre and two litres of volume for wine or water. What is it in relation to coffee? The glass bowl the coffee drips into in one of those dripping coffee makers?
Exactly that. I picture it as one of those big jugs on an industrial coffee machine with the black or orange plastic to indicate if it has caffeine
I learned that word from my dad when I was a child. we kept a carafe in the refrigerator designated for water. It’s a wine carafe but can put anything in it. My dad was an alcoholic so he had a wine carafe and a lot of other alcohol-related accoutrements like beer steins.
I was scolded by a boss for using words that to me were perfectly ordinary everyday words. Words like “cognate” or “cognizant”, say, but to him they sounded like I was showing off and making people feel bad.
Oops.
That’s a different issue from sandhi. Vocabulary and dialect are another area of active study (often paired with yet another realm: sociolinguistics: the language you speak changes according to your social environment) that is a real rabbit hole.
I’ve been learning German too myself, and the thing that the traditional language courses don’t teach you is the way natives speak. Listening to actual German speakers was pretty much alien to me even after two years until I bumped into a couple Easy German videos where they touch the very same subject as this xkcd and that actually got me listening to certain parts of speech more carefully and that way also understand it better.
Now I actually find myself doing the same shortcuts sometimes when I’m progressing with the skill. It’s the same with English since I have to use it daily at work even though I’m not a native speaker. Funny how the languages work in real life vs. in theory.
My wife being bemused I don’t understand french in Paris after learning french for 3 years. Dude, they speak such sloppy french I’m impressed they understand each other.
Agreed…I was especially impressed after I learned about their Verlan. As far as I can tell it’s basically pig Latin that they take seriously and use regularly as slang? As a quick example, the word Verlan is Verlan for l’envers. They can keep their secrets I guess haha.
I think Verlan is pretty neat. We had a full lesson on it in middle school because of one of our country’s most popular musicians, Stromae, which is Verlan for Maestro.
Fantastic! Stromae is actually the reason I learned verlan existed! I got to see him live in the US, and it was one of the coolest live shows I’ve ever seen. The majority of the video for quand c’est is an actual part of the live show, and I wasn’t expecting it at all
Wait, Verlan is l’envers, stromae is maestro… Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish’s Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)
EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.
Lol is that what happens when they have an official institute that dictates correct French? “Oh it’s not slang, it’s verlan!”
Is that a pun on l’inverse?
Ah, and they’re not the worst haha.
Joseph Justus Scaliger said something similar about Basque in the 17th century:
C’eſt un langage eſtrange que le Baſque… On dit, qu’ils s’entendent, je n’en crois rien
Basque is a strange language… It is said that they understand one another, but I don’t believe any of it.
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Hah, I’ve seen it years ago. Classic.
I get as far as the third panel. Anything beyond that is drunk speak
I thought the same at first, but then I tried actually saying it out loud. “Yeah, I’m just gonna go to the shops”. And I actually think Munroe has it right here, at least for my accent. If I had been asked to say it and carefully analyse it myself, I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all that I was eliding more than “going to” to “gonna”. And if I had noticed, I still probably would have analysed it as (and I’m using Hangul here because frankly I don’t know how to spell out the vowel in the Latin alphabet in a way that actually makes sense) 근 (basically “gun”, but with a lazier vowel). But it’s definitely been elided down to a single syllable.
The key thing is that this only happens when putting it into the middle of a full sentence. If it’s the only word I say, it stays “gonna”.
edit: wait 🤦♂️. I can use IPA. I’d have analysed it as /gən/ But realistically, Munroe’s /gә̃/ is probably more accurate.
I can only get to /gә̃/ if I make an effort to say it faster than I ever actually talk. Otherwise, it definitely always has that “n” sound in there.
Yeah, “gon’” seems about the most efficient form of “going to” that would be recognizable.
Going to > gonna > gon’
I guess if you’ve lived anywhere where speech has drifted a little hillbilly this version is just daily speech rather than any need for speed.
I didn’t get it until I started trying to say “hot potato” in the middle of a sentence, like “Look out! Hot potato incoming!”
The ‘t’ in “hot” became more and more like a glottal stop as my tongue started to touch the gums of my top front teeth less and less.
Still, I don’t think I could uncover that alien impersonator.
“I’m goa have some hot potato.”
Too me the “t” (at most) emphasises the hotness. Am I wrong?
Are you the alien? Nobody calls a potato for eating hot potato… If you’re eating a potato it’s going to be hot. Hot potato is referring to the game where you pass something along very quickly. It’s saying you’re all passing something along that no one wants to get caught with or stuck with, and it’s almost never literally, it’s usually taking about a responsibility being passed or something like that.
If you’re eating a potato it’s going to be hot.
Potato salad has entered the chat.
No, fellow human. Of course I am not the alien. Ha, ha, ha. You are funny and I would be pleased to talk with you another time in the future. Ha, ha, ha. Good bye.
The alien impersonator was me all along! HAHAHA!!!
I mean, seriously, I am not a native English speaker, but even with my weird English accent, it only became weirder if I try to speak fast while keeping the emphasis on that ‘t’ at the end of “hot”. My native accent also probably lends to that glottal stop taking over the ‘t’ and merging it with the upcoming ‘p’ sound. It also helps that the two sounds (glottal stop and the bilabial ‘p’) are on opposite sides of my mouth, so I can quickly sound them in succession. The end result sounded to me like an exaggerated “posh British” rendition, as if the alien watched way too much BBC before invading Earth.
It just sounded way weirder than I otherwise would be. I can’t really describe it.
Nice. There’s lots of areas I’ve lived where the locals drop specific consonants from the names of places. So anyone who actually pronounces the place name “correctly” is immediately recognized as new to town.
I can only think if Toron(t)o. Never really thought about other towns doing the same thing.
When I hear someone from that city say their city’s name, it sounds like it should be spelled “Trono.”
Shibboleths are amazing! Calgary is almost universally pronounced “Cal-Gary” by non-locals, locals say “Calgree”
I’m gonna have to disagree with you. Have you ever seen a Shoggoth? They’re horrific and just because they’re protoplasmic beings doesn’t mean their mispronunciation of English should be celebrated.
Vangcouver. =] Also every city in Australia.
Melb’n
Like the other reply said, it’s all over the place in Australia. You can easily tell a tourist—especially an American tourist—because they’ll say “can-bair-a” instead of “can-bruh”.
It’s not unusual in the UK, too. Worcester is Wost-er, Magdalen(e) is mawd-lin, and Leicester is lester.
OMG, that makes it so much worse. If someone tells you about a specific place, and you want to look it up later, you have absolutely zero chance of ever spelling it correctly. Good luck typing lester or woster in Wikipedia or Maps.
As it happens, that worked just fine:
Worcester is famous even outside the UK because of Worcestershire sauce (pronounced “woster-shuh” sauce), the condiment named after the region. And because the name is on the bottle, it’s easy for people to remember.
We have a Bradenton nearby which gets shortened to branton (pronounced like brain-nton). Gotta have the long A or else you’ll accidently send someone half an hour away to Brandon.
Oh that’s just great. Two similar place names like that, and they also happen to be relatively close to each other. I can see how that could cause some confusion.
Similarly, Kuhmo and Kuhmoinen (both in Finland) are about 446 km apart, but you can easily avoid the confusion as long as you know roughly which part of the country you’re talking about.
There’s also Helsingborg (town in Sweden) and Helsinfors (swedish name for the capital of Finland). What could go wrong.
Surely you mean “Trahnah”?
Louisville becomes Luhvul
Oregonian checking in here.
See, my middle name ends with an S and my last name begins with an S… and my middle name is a pluralized name, so nobody hears the S when I say it in conjunction with my last name. So I’ve gotten really good at pronouncing the S, stopping for a beat, then saying my last name, without it sounding super weird or robotic.
So properly pronouncing “hot potato” while enunciating the first T doesn’t seem too challenging to me.
This is some riddle shit I can’t figure out
Something like “Adams Smith” probably fits the bill. People would hear “Adam Smith”
Thanks so much! I always sucked at riddles I couldn’t come up with anything lol
We English wouldn’t only drop the first t, we’d drop the h and the final t as well, 'o pota’o… innit
And in my experience (or at least how I as a foreigner was taught the English RP pronounciation), often also the spaces between words.
RP drives me crazy with its bizarre pronunciation rules. Like never pronouncing ‘R’ unless it’s not there.
“Law and order” under RP approximates “lo ran doh duh” where literally every ‘R’ in the phrase is not spoken, but they jam one in place of the ‘W’.
ARGH! THE SPIDERS ARE EATING MY EYEBALLS FROM THE INSIDE!
Hop-tay’doh
Subscribe, I love these
Haw’potado
Phonetically, it’s exactly right, but It visually reads like the name of a Vulcan side character from an episode of star trek
As a non native English speaker, I had to read your comments to understand the “Hot potato” one… Seems that I’m not as fluent in English as I thought (my accent is shit)
“hu- p-taydoh”
I’m sorry, but this one fails hard. My country ass drawls like I get paid by the vowel length, and I’ve never once shortened going to, to a single syllable. Never heard anyone do it either.
And hot potato isn’t difficult to say at all.
Is this one a joke rather than something that’s supposed to be real?
Now, I’m not saying we don’t have some mush mouthed mofos up in these here hills, we do. Just not to that degree at all.
Edit: for anyone coming late to the party, I did say it in a sentence, and even changed the sentence up to see if it was some kind of specific thing like that. Got kind of obsessed with it for an hour or two, calling up friends that know I’m strange about language oddities and don’t mind.
No matter how fast I got, no matter what sentence I tried, there was still a distinct, split second pause with an inhalation between them that makes the t and p distinct from each other. There was no ha’patata effect, or anything similar. Just hot, that brief pause as the tongue shifts and the lips purse for the potato, then the potato in a sweet southern drawl.
Maybe it was the “this fails hard” part that set off the parade of “yes it does” regardless of the fact that someone is saying that not only do they not do it, but other people with the same or similar regional accent don’t either. And that’s the case. The only two people I could rope in to try it out that did it came from Pennsylvania originally, and haven’t developed a proper way of speaking yet (and if anyone doesn’t recognize that as a joke, bugger off).
Shit, I was enthusiastic about this little quirk of speech. But damn, people maybe not keep repeating the same fucking thing when someone is making a good faith conversation about an oddity of language that should be interesting rather than another chance to feel superior by sticking to a generalization in a fucking comic strip.
If you can’t say “tellyahwat” in one syllable you’re not country enough
Y’all need to gitonupouttahyuh
You slow down for the t in hot? If you say hot potato aloud, in a sentence, you’ll likely drop the T. This also really depends on your accent.
Atleast when I slowed down to say it aloud, it sounded quite unnatural to purposely slow down for that T sound in Hot
Nah, no need to slow down. Molasses flows faster in winter unless I’m pissed off and swearing. The t and p are distinct. The o vowels in potato get drawn out, and essentially turn into puhtaytuh, unless I’m paying attention and speaking formally but the t and p are separate. I’ve been annoying my wife trying to make a sentence where it happens, even asked my dad to do it so I could hear him.
I plan to annoy other family and friends tomorrow because it seems weird for something universal enough to end up in an xkcd to not happen at least enough to have encountered it, but because “hot potato” is a game, and a slang term, I’ve heard it a lot. I can’t think of any time there wasn’t at least a partial stop between the t and p, with the t being distinct. Plenty of mangling potato until it sounds like a foreign word, but that’s a different thing
Maybe it’s regional? Gods know the Appalachian dialect is full of some weird quirks.
You’re not supposed to just say hot potato. Use it the middle of a sentence then say it fast.
Turning ‘potato’ into ‘puhtaytuh’ is an example of what they’re talking about. Saying ‘puhtaytuh’ involves less mouth movement than saying ‘potato’.
Try using ‘hot potato’ in a sentence and you’ll probably notice that the glottal stop at the end of ‘hot’ gets toned down or dropped. The ‘t’ sound will still be there, but your tounge wont move as much as if you say ‘hot’ on it’s own.
I keep fucking saying that I’ve been doing that, and it doesn’t fucking happen.
Y’all motherfuckers apparently never come into the mountains where speech is slooooow by default.
Even speeding up on purpose, it doesn’t happen. Which is why I made the original comment in the first place. Wouldn’t waste my fucking time otherwise. Jfc people can be assholes over nothing at all
It’s a broad generalization, but it’s not really a matter of opinion. We can scan people’s mouths and faces when they talk (and have in order to demonstrate this stuff). I think the last example probably only applies that way in particular circumstances though, since English speakers automatically group, contract, and arrange certain phonemes in certain orders (e.g., I’m not, I ain’t, but never I amn’t–and in real speech “I ain’t” is almost always one syllable). In this example, more frequently my country ass contracts the first syllable of “gonna” away instead of the second, so “I’m 'na head to the store; y’all need anything?”
The hot potato example just stands for the premise that in real speech the t at the end of hot and the p at the beginning of potato slur together, and if you deliberately enunciate both consonants, you sound like you’re reading to a transcriber. Compare the way a normal person says “let’s go” to the way you sound if you force separate the words: you sound like you’re doing a Mario impression.
I’m sitting here sounding like an idiot repeating the phrase, and doing a full sentence. There’s a distinct, split second pause in between the t and p, no matter how fast I try to go.I can’t seem to say the hot without that t being crisp, with the tongue against the upper part of the mouth, then the shift for the p causing a tiny pause in between.
If anything, there’s a brief inhalation, which is kind of a sound that links them. Is that what it’s supposed to be? We can’t be that far off around here. My dad says it the same way I do, I bugged him about it earlier.
When I force it into one mouth movement, it turns into a “tup” sound, but that feels alien to me.
Prob applies most to the GenAm accent
I had to think of a ghetto accent “I’m ga’a fuck you up, mate”.
So, it’s not like there’s no movement in that single syllable. A mild attempt is made at pronouncing two syllables, by having the back of the tongue shortly touch the roof of the mouth. But for properly pronouncing an “n”, the front of your tongue needs to touch the roof of your mouth, and that’s certainly not happening.
Yes. You a special snowflake who is the only human being on planet Earth who doesn’t do sandhi. You should go to the nearest university’s linguistics department and show off your linguistically unique trait. You could probably make a decent living as a guest speaker at linguistics conventions too.
🙄
Hey, suck a dick buddy
I’ll leave that to the expert.
Djeet?
No, djou?
👏Perfect choice.
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Hop-pa-taydo
Also, the phrase “I’m going to” is often shortened to “I’mma” or “I’m ‘onna”. When referring to oneself, we tend to drop the G entirely
like this example for Imma be there.
Amusingly, just a couple of days ago we had a post about this same phenomenon in [email protected].
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